Family Times

Post holiday Sumnicht family get-together. Little Chute, WI.

Hometime New Years

I am entirely too disorganized to post all the food and the adventure and the holiday I've been having, but in the spirit of 'one step at a time', I thought I'd just stop in to wish you a happy start to this year. I crossed into 2011 happily in the company of both of my siblings and my old time besties Abby + Matt in their fair Madison, WI. (This, you may realize, is a mere stone's throw from my hometown hometown, Neenah.) New Years's in Wisconsin have never been in my experience terribly memorable and this year, we were hoping to change that.

We made homemade ravioli! I've never done that! And despite their filling being a little 'overwhelmingly hazelnut', they were tasty. Other perks of the holiday included some scrappy rum and coke pre-gaming, champagne and cocktails at the new cozy & hip farm to table spot downtown for midnight, an awesome show in a crowded bar to finish off our livers, hot, frosted cinnamon rolls and breakfast sammies to cure any lingering hangovers this morning and, then, college football. With the exception of Badger defeat at the hands of TCU, it was perfect.










Not bad, Wisconsin, not bad at all. To the new! Cheers.

Portland, Oregon

After we left Comptche, we drove almost 14 hours along Route 1 into Oregon. It was a long day. We stopped to say hi to John's Aunt Honey and Uncle Eric, who live on a sort of menagerie in rural Oregon, and then we spent the duration in PDX, itself. We'd both been before, but never with such worthy friends to stay with and never over Thankgsgiving. Thanksgiving is my favorite no matter where you spend it, but may I especially recommend you find a year to spend that holiday in Portland. The drizzle, the bungalows, the comfy style of the city is perfectly and completely suited to a November vacation devoted to eating.

The next few posts will be a collection of the most photogenic moments of our trip. Just to put names with faces, we were visiting Jesse and Lauren, old favorites from Virginia and Mary Frances Wegmann, my better half. Hope you'll indulge yet another photographic reminiscence.











More soon.

The Cabin

I've had all these things to show you, gathering dust since late November, when we took a West Coast vacation through Mendocino County and up to Portland, Oregon to be with friends for the Thanksgiving holiday. There are so may moments worth recounting that I expect this will come in several parts. It all started when Miriam invited us to come stay for a weekend in her family cabin in Comptche, a tiny tiny town just 20 miles or so from Fort Bragg in Northern California.



We headed up on a Saturday afternoon. After leaving California Hwy. 101, we drove mostly along a winding road through a sleepy hollow sort of landscape, light green and lush and rocky beautiful the whole way. We lost the light thirty minutes shy of our arrival, so that by the time we pulled into the cabin's gravel drive, our eyes were tired from squinting at road signs. We were in a forest, we figured, dark as it was by 6:30, but that was all we could tell.

My grandparents have a cabin in northern Wisconsin, perched on a hill, looking over a lake. Jungle Lake, as we fondly call it, is painted in a blue wash and decorated with vaguely Scandinavian knick-nacks, built by my dad's family in the 60's. Not knowing what to expect, as always with my California, I imagined to find the same sort of thing at Miriam's in Comptche. I woke up our first morning, to find something else entirely.








In truth, they aren't so different. The redwood forest that surrounds Comptche, at the scale of the majestic, is more impressive probably than the familiar woods at Jungle Lake. But where the cabin itself was punctuated with their families' history there--a museum of treasures collected on hikes adorning an exterior wall, lamps and drinking glasses handmade by Miriam's dad and the cabin garden tended by Miriam's mom--I was constantly reminded of the parallel traditions we kept at Jungle Lake. We have a birch cribbage table that my grandfather made from a felled log and an announcemnent still hangs in the hall closet for a pounce tournament "tomorrow morning" that we made when we were kids. Each time Miriam would explain a ritual of Comptche, I would remember one of my own. In a bit of a flood of memory, I realized how much I'd forgotten of the Jungle Lake traditions since I moved away.

They're a lot like time capsules, cabins. They envelope you in that familial slowness, where things assure you they will remain the same forever and you can just laze about in that promise. In the comfort of someone else's cabin capsule, I was able to enjoy that very home feeling. It was a perfect way to begin our Thanksgiving.

Via Philadelphia

People out here ask me all the time, "Where are you from?"

It's a perfectly reasonable question, especially because here in San Francisco most of the residents have relocated from somewhere else. The concentration of the young, attractive, healthy and progressive is just too high for any natural urban evolution. We tend to flock here in droves, and so when people inevitably ask me the big question, I usually just say Wisconsin because it's shorter than the truth.

While Wisconsin is certainly where I was born, and where I was raised, and where I go when I'm going Home, the truth about where I am from is somewhat more hairy. I feel like I did a fair amount of growing up in New York State, where I went to school, in New York city, where I first learned to know a city, in St. Petersburg where I learned to go it alone and mostly, in Philadelphia, where I made my first permanent home.

These days there seems to be a great divide between the people I know who pick up and leave to travel the world and live out of some combination of a tote bag, a bicycle pannier and a backpack, and the people who go somewhere to stay, to sign a lease and build a life in a single place. While both have attractive qualities, I've always fallen quite softly into the latter group because of how happy I am to settle in. Knowing my neighbors, building a routine, hanging up curtains and learning the best parts of a city are things I count as blessings.

And yet, I have an eagerness to live in new places, which has now carried me into my fifth urban residence since high school. So when I'm asked where I'm from, I have such a compound sentence at the ready. "Well..." it always starts. "Wisconsin, via New York State via Philadephia."

My hybrid loyalties to both the nomads and the settlers has made this most recent move bittersweet. And this weekend we're headed to Philly and it will be my first visit since leaving that great city last August. A tiny part of me is nervous that I'll feel more at home while I'm there visiting that past-tense landscape than I do out here in California. It will be a good litmus test for me, to sort out my mix of feelings around our move to the west coast; the lingering regret over leaving a life we loved and the strength of conviction that we did the right thing, for the sake of the adventure. Change, I'm always reminding myself, is a good thing.



I'm excited beyond words for these next five days, whatever the result. I think I'll count happy visits back in the "Advantages to Moving" column of my pros and cons chart...or would if I had one of those.

Escape to Wisconsin

A while ago, I think I alluded to my having taken more old fashioned photos and that I'd be putting them up here. In fact, I shot 4 rolls back in December while I was home at the holiday. Until a week ago, they'd been sitting on top of my dresser, waiting until my checking account could sign off on the cost of processing. I took them to the photo store amidst my slurry of sewing work and just a few days ago picked up the prints.

Mostly, I really can't use a camera. But it wasn't as important in this case for the pictures to be great. The purpose for me was just to make a record of a place where I spent most of my childhood, the workshop in my grandparents' basement.


Since Bumpa (Jack, to most) died four years ago, I've hardly been home to visit and even more seldom am I back at my grandmother's house. The basement has been left mostly in tact, preserved in time. Someday, it will be a terrific job to clear out. Every possible surface has become a drawer or a shelf or a storage mechanism for keeping tools and glues and paint and glass and wood and screws and nails and machinery. We used to joke that he could make anything in that basement. And he did. An elaborate dollhouse when I was young. And then a white writing desk when I was twelve. And in between he made little locomotives, paperweights, his kitchen table, a swing set and countless other things people wished aloud and that he would figure out and make. It was one of the first ways that I defined kindness.



He was a maker of things. Jack of all trades, literally. And you might say that I get my streak of inventiveness from him.

Yes, that's a gun. And yes, that's an NRA sticker above it.

I took these photos so that in the case that someday his workshop is dismantled, I'll be able to remember what exactly it was like. The calendar girls half-clothed beside power tools on the inside of the storeroom door. The drawer in his office filled with gumdrops and peanut M&M's. The can full of wax scraps leftover from the holly candles he made every Christmas. And what the shapes of his handwriting look like.




The four prints in the Bakerex frames in my previous post are also from this set.